'Lower Assendon'

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Christmas Exhibition, London, 10-17 Dec. / "'Lower Assendon'"

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This canvas was executed in the summer of 2016 but it was originally conceived as the result of a chance encounter the artist had one summer night in the Chiltern Hills in the early 1980s when the artist was living and painting at Henley on Thames nearby. In a field at Lower Assendon he came across a family of hares frisking in a field of rapeseed. It was midsummer with a simultaneous sunset and moonrise, as shown in the painting. With the moon and stars in the top left hand corner and the sun and fast-fading light in the top right. Halliday was able to make a sketch on the spot without scaring off the subject. Thirty years later the sketch was finally turned into this large and magical oil on canvas. Of the original studies Halliday's mentor John Piper who lived nearby at Fawley Bottom, accurately observed, 'it is all on the surface of the canvas and yet all in depth'.